What ails America, part B

Health hysteria, individual or environmental, is everywhere. Actually, rampant I believe. I used to think this foolishness was confined to dopey, ex-hippies who claimed to be sensitive to or negatively impacted by all sorts of things in life. Or generated by the Cosmic Organics people who developed a rash if they inadvertently ate a tomato from Chile.

Nowadays, my local Senior Center has notices on the doors saying you cannot wear any scent in the building. People near where I live claim they get vertigo from a wind turbine located at some distance from their homes. Others claim their children misbehave because of it. A lady I know says she gets headaches from RF waves and won’t let the gas company put a new meter on her house.

There are reasons New England has the highest gasoline, home heating and electricity rates in the country. Proposals to build refineries are always defeated, off or on shore LNG terminals are protested, wind turbine farms are in court for ten years, high tension electricity lines are halted.

I remember when a new soccer fields or park or library was thought to be a good thing for the town. Not anymore. NIMBY rules the land. An elderly couple here recently halted construction of a mixed housing development because it would be on land behind their house and they wanted the land, although it is privately owned, to remain undeveloped regardless of the general welfare.

The larger issue, of course, is that we, as a country, as a society, are totally unable to determine what would be in our overall best interests and proceed from there. We use the Interstate Highway System every day but are resigned to the fact that it could not be built, and certainly cannot be expanded, today. We complain about the cost of gas and electricity and heating oil but we refuse to do anything that would help to reduce those costs. If the proposal adversely affects one nut, in good conscience we cannot go forward.

This does not bode well for my town, Massachusetts or America.